November 2018

Today is our one year adoption anniversary! I sat down to write some words about our adoption day and this is what came out. It is more of a walk through of what our adoption day looked like. It is informal and maybe put together in an odd format but this is it. This is adoption day through my eyes.

Coordinating outfits, people gathered, judge in a happy mood because he finally has a happy thing to do in court. Smiles, tears, and celebrating. Months and sometimes years of paperwork. Choosing to love a child for better or for worse after initially choosing to love a child whether they will be with you for a day or for the rest of your life. Ups and downs. One might call that an emotional rollercoaster.

The family court hall is full of people. Some are there for the worst day of their life. Their family is in the process of being broken apart. Some are there for the best day of their life. Their family is legally saying yes to being together forever. If you are lucky like us you have a ton of people rallying in a tiny court room. You have family, friends, siblings in another state watching via facetime, college roommates, and if you are really lucky your foster and adoption journey has extended your family even further by welcoming your child’s biological siblings and their families into the mix.

The judge smiles. The judge goes through the legalities to make it official. The judge cracks jokes that he can only crack during adoption court. The judge asks you if you will provide for, love, and care for your child forever. With a confident but emotional crack in your voice you say yes. You look at your child, you look at your spouse, you look at all of the loving and caring faces in the room that supported and loved you through this journey to get you to this point. It feels surreal.

So many pictures are taken. Picture with the judge, picture with the CPS workers, picture with your child’s guardian ad litem, pictures with every single one of the people who came to share this day. You leave the courtroom and go back in to the halls of the family court unit. You are reminded again that your best day is someone else’s worst. You don’t let that sit lightly and choose to remember that. Hugs are given, tears are shed, babies are getting grumpy and overwhelmed, but your heart is so full. You officially share the same last name as the small person you call your child.

Happy Thanksgiving week! It really doesn’t feel like Thanksgiving where I live because everything is COVERED in snow. Like multiple feet of snow already. WHAT?! So my brain is already in Christmas mode BUT I love Thanksgiving and I love Fall so I am going to reel it back a bit and throw out a wonderful warm fall vegetable soup that will keep you warm and satisfied this season. This fall vegetable soup would even do great on a Thanksgiving table this week as a unique healthy option.

Make it and pair it with a good ole salad and something to dip in it, you know a good soup vessel to soak up all the thick creamy goodness in your bowl. Ok, let’s get to it. This soup doesn’t need any more of an intro!

Ingredients:

1 yellow onion

1 small butternut squash

1 medium sweet potato

2 medium carrots

2 Honeycrisp apples

4 garlic cloves smashed

2 fresh sage leaves finely chopped

1/4 tsp thyme (dried or fresh)

2 tbs butter (use vegan butter to make this recipe fully vegan)

1/4 tsp cinnamon

4 cups vegetable broth

1 can full fat coconut milk

salt and pepper to taste

Instructions:

Chop onion and melt butter in a pot over medium heat. Add chopped onion into butter to sauté for 2 minutes stirring often.

I have had these words pent up in my mind and deep down in my heart for a while now. These words have stemmed from thinking of all of the aspects of adoption, of foster care, of infertility, of beauty and of heartbreak, not just the joy that adoption has brought us. How did we get here? How did I get to this exact moment in life where I am a mother of a brilliant little girl through foster care and now adoption?

Ever since I can remember I wanted to be a mom. The idea of family, of nurturing, of growing, of encouraging, of being together, was my biggest hope in life. I knew about adoption because I have extended family members who were adopted and while that wasn’t a big topic of discussion in our family I wonder if that subconsciously played a role in my deep interest in adoption. In fifth grade I did a research project on adoption that was presented in front of my whole school. You see, it seems like I was knit together in a special way that adoption would forever be a part of my life.

While I always hoped to adopt, I didn’t know that I would have to trudge through two painful and heartbreaking years of infertility to get to the place of feeling God’s hand leading us in that direction. Infertility was heartbreak that later turned into the most beautiful surrender of my life. Surrendering what I wanted for the sake of finding peace in what God’s will was for my life.

In adoption there are three parties involved. The birth family, the adoptee, and the adoptive family. It would be the biggest disservice I could do to my daughter not to recognize the heartbreak involved in her coming into our lives. While our daughter sadly was an orphan at the time she came into our family, I still am heartbroken for her birth family. When I take the time to think of her story, I am still heartbroken for her, even though she feels 100% my daughter and to be honest in my day to day life it’s easy to forget that she was born to another woman. I grieve for the loss of opportunities her birth parents had, what kind of parents could they have been if they were given the same opportunities I was? What kind of life could my daughter have lived if her birth parents were able to raise her and love her all of her days? These are the kind of questions that could be easy to ignore and not ask if I wasn’t willing to dive into the difficult intricacies of adoption emotions. You see, if we lived in a perfect world, adoption wouldn’t exist because there would be no need for it. We obviously don’t live in a perfect world though and there are no perfect people. It is my greatest honor to be an adoptive mom. I am just a mom actually. I am no different than any other mom except I have my little girl’s story to honor. I have her questions to answer, I have a delicate dance to do to honor her heritage, one that is so vastly different from my own, I have her birth family, that despite what choices they did or didn’t make, to hold in my heart and my daughter’s heart because she deserves to know her story, her roots.

There is no other way I can describe the emotional aspect of adoption other than beautiful heartbreak. Beautiful because adoption made us a family. Beautiful because adoption gave our daughter parents to keep her safe, to stand next to her and encourage her/be there for her for life. Beautiful because it fulfilled my husband and I’s dream to become parents, it brought life, laughter, boundless joy, memories to forever be made, and lessons that needed/ need to be learned into our home. Beautiful heartbreak because no matter how beautiful adoption is, it involves heartbreak. As mentioned in the previous paragraph there is so much to be grieved. I wonder how often E’s birth parents cry over her? I don’t know if they do but I would imagine despite the choices they made that their hearts are broken. As my daughter grows I know there will be times, maybe frequently, maybe infrequently, where she will wonder what life would have been like if she was with her birth family. I can’t say what she will or won’t experience heartbreak over in regards to her story, but I know there will be times where it is hard for her, rightfully so.

As an adoptive mom I am learning so much lately. In many cases, our adopted children grieve and struggle with their adoption quite frequently, especially if they are held back from knowing their story. We need to sit with them, we need to listen, we need to point them to important truths, remind them of how loved they are, but most importantly we need to just listen. Despite how loved they are by us, their adoptive families, and how much they love their families in return, it is something we need to talk about often and stand next to them as they find healing/find answers/process things.

I pray God’s grace in my daughter’s life. I pray that she would be confident in who she is as a Child of God, who she is as a woman, who she is as our daughter, and where she came from. I pray that her story would empower her to help others and be the best person she can be. Beautiful Heartbreak and all.